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Monday, July 16, 2007

Lansing | Sorry about that state worker database

Lansing State Journal Publisher Richard Ramhoff says the paper was "inundated with hundreds of e-mails, phone calls, online postings and letters" after it published a database of state employee salaries. He says the short story announcing the database was, well, too short.

"Six paragraphs would not provide enough context for the complex issues we would touch,'' he wrote in a column published yesterday. The paper came back with a package of stories yesterday about state workers being "under seige,'' apparently an attempt to throw a bone to the angry employees.

I'm glad the paper didn't take the database down entirely; that would have sent the wrong message to readers. But it looks like the text accompanying the database hasn't been updated to reflect Ramhoff's explanation of why the paper published it in the first place.

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